Fred Nathan
The impressive results of full-day kindergarten provide a strong foundation for further education reforms.
Recently, Michael Swickard wrote that New Mexico’s educational leaders have “destroyed” kindergarten over the past decade by making full-day, rather than half-day, classes available to students.
However, half-day kindergarten developed more as an accident of history than as a result of any rational theory of child development. In fact, the very first kindergarten classes in the United States, which were established in Wisconsin in 1856, were full-day.
Before World War II, most kindergarten programs were full-day. Classes were cut to half-day to make up for the shortage of teachers caused by the war, as well as the lack of classroom space in the aftermath of the baby boom. Cutting classes in half meant that one teacher in one classroom could teach two kindergarten classes a day – one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, research on child development began to demonstrate the immense, lifelong benefits of early childhood education. Children with access to more and better early learning opportunities grew up to have higher monthly earnings, higher rates of home ownership, lower welfare dependency, and fewer arrests than their peers.
In response to these findings, states began to revive their full-day kindergarten programs. (This was also the reason that Head Start was launched in 1965. That is, to give young children from economically disadvantaged families the developmental tools and experiences needed to succeed later in their lives.)
New Mexico plays catch-up
Unfortunately, New Mexico lagged behind most other states. By 1999, 54.7 percent of five year olds in the United States had access to full-day kindergarten classes, compared with only 14.7 percent of five year olds in New Mexico (who received full-day kindergarten thanks to federal Title I funding for economically disadvantaged students).
The “half-day” label for the classes that were the only option for the other 85 percent of New Mexico’s five-year-olds was something of a misnomer, since they lasted only 2.5 hours. Many children in rural communities spent more time on the bus going to and from school than they did in the classroom.
In 2000, Think New Mexico championed legislation to provide voluntary full-day kindergarten classes to every child in New Mexico. Our strongest allies in that effort were first-grade teachers, who noted that many of their students were coming to them from half-day kindergarten classes without being able to recognize letters, a serious impediment to their learning how to read.
The bipartisan law that passed the legislature and was signed by Governor Gary Johnson required full-day kindergarten classes to be “child-centered and developmentally appropriate,” and provided that the classes were voluntary on the part of both school districts and parents.
Voting with their feet
Today, all 89 school districts in New Mexico have chosen to offer full-day kindergarten classes to their students, and about 99 percent of parents choose full-day, rather than half-day, classes for their children. Parents, teachers and principals are voting with their feet in favor of full-day kindergarten.
The benefits of the full-day classes have been clear from the beginning. In the first three years of full-day kindergarten, 94 percent, 95 percent, and 99 percent of the children in those classes met or exceeded the literacy skills needed to enter first grade and learn how to read. Indeed, many first grade teachers reported that their students arrived already reading, a happy unintended consequence of full-day kindergarten.
In 2009, the Deming Headlight reported that: “(Education Secretary) Garcia noted a statewide, 5-year upward trend in Math, Reading and Science, with the percent of students proficient or above increasing 11 percent in Math, 5 percent in Reading and 6 percent in Science. She noted improvement of third-graders, the first students who had advantage of full-day kindergarten, in 2005-06.”
The impressive results of full-day kindergarten provide a strong foundation for further education reforms. To learn more about full-day kindergarten and Think New Mexico’s efforts to make it accessible to every child in the state, we invite you to click here.
Fred Nathan is executive director of Think New Mexico, an independent, results-oriented think tank serving New Mexicans.